An uplifting survey of our deep debts to ancient Greece, emphasizing civic life and the literary imagination.
The glory that was.
This lively survey by Davie, a former Oxford lecturer, traces the enduring impact of ancient Greek culture on modern life and literature. Greek city-states fostered a new way of looking at, and talking about, the world. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and their heirs observed daily life to explain and question how we live and why. Homer has influenced anyone wanting to tell a story. Sappho taught us how to love. Aristophanes taught us how to laugh. And yet, all was not glory. Early Greek society, for all its claims to participatory democracy, was highly stratified. Perhaps the most important chapter in this book is that on slavery. “Slavery was fundamentally important to the democracy in Athens,” Davie writes. “A man had to be seriously impoverished not to own a slave.” But, he adds, “Athenians seem to have treated their slaves better than did most other people in the ancient world.” The author tries to reconcile the gifts of Greece with ownership of human beings: “Perhaps we should not be too quick in condemning ancient societies as uncivilized for practicing slavery.” Other classicists have been more nuanced in their understanding of these contradictions in Greek life. And classics, as a discipline, is now looking not West but East—to the Black Sea and the Middle East—as the true home of Greek-speaking culture. For general readers, however, this book affirms Western culture’s debt to the Greek world. It makes you feel good about being smart and educated. It makes you want to lead an examined life. If it papers over the cracks in that Parthenon of the imagination, at least it gets you in the door.
An uplifting survey of our deep debts to ancient Greece, emphasizing civic life and the literary imagination.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781399424790
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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